RUBBERNECKING!, PART 2.

(continued from http://semtexfollies.blogspot.com/2010/10/rubbernecking.html)

These works are fictions about factual events, and that they deploy their "factuality" as a formal strategy, like using medical language in a poem meant to be swooned over by doctors, precisely because they have some theologico-political function to play in the spectacle. In a closed, totalitarian system, the "subversive" artist would have to resort to aesopic language, that is allegorical presentation ala Animal Farm. In contrast, these films, like other media currently in prominence, allegorize using facts or "factuality".

Because of the symbolic freight they have to carry, why not call them factual allegories? Facts are one of the chief currencies of a technocratic state, maybe its’ life "blood". And facts are self evident and atomic, right? They need no decryption, you can't argue with them, they are envois straight from the Real. But they are rather dull and interchangeable, not that sexy. And so it's important today that facts become "sensualized" and textured through images so that people, citizens, can have propulsive, ideally uncontrolled, emotional responses to them. That might be a good working definition of Realism in the cinema: The sensualized, eroticized, fact.

Fact porno. To arouse the never-consummated “lust” of brechtian politics. The politics of froth.

If journalism is the first draft of history, certain filmed images (Images of Convention...) conclude the historic, foreclosing the possibility of analysis, or of reflection. Madonna is Marilyn Monroe and Evita Peron. And Lady Gaga contains Madonna now, in some way. 

I suspect that the russian doll quality of images is antithetical to history.